Elizabeth and After (5 page)

And suddenly Carl could remember being Lizzie’s age, staring at his hands on the desk, suddenly conscious of the way his nails were bitten down, inflamed. Raising his eyes to
his mother and realizing she had a funny way of glancing at him every few seconds as though she thought no one else would notice. He remembered how uncomfortable it had been to have every kid in his class spend the whole day staring at his mother, how embarrassed he was if the least wisp of her hair was out of place, if her blouse was tucked in unevenly or the back of her skirt smudged with chalk. The way she stood at the blackboard, her behind swaying, the chalk squeaking. The way she had of sitting at her desk and sliding her glasses down her nose to read, as though she didn’t even
care
what she looked like.

“I wouldn’t want to be in my mother’s class,” Lizzie said. “Everyone would make fun of me.”

“I know what you mean,” Carl said. “No one ever lets you forget about your mother.” Then Lizzie ran ahead to the play area, pulled herself up on the bars and began swinging along them, turning to him every few seconds with a proud but questioning smile.

At noon on the day Carl McKelvey came back to West Gull, Adam Goldsmith was standing in front of Richardson’s New & Used. He didn’t know Carl had returned, his eyes were half-closed, and he watched with his usual disinterest as Carl’s truck turned in to park between a set of the newly painted yellow diagonals in front of the Timberpost Restaurant. Through the plastic windows of the truck’s canopy Adam Goldsmith could see a jumble of furniture and cardboard boxes. When he was a child men would appear on the streets of West Gull, their shabby coats heavy with dirt. By nightfall they would be gone, Adam never knew where. Now it was young men in trucks packed with the remnants of their last stop, their last woman, their last job.

He had been thinking about Moses in the desert. The story told was that because he broke his magic staff, God had punished him by denying him the Promised Land. How could Moses have been so stupid? But there had been so many promises. The truth was that Moses had broken his staff on purpose. After a certain point a man wants to stay where he is. No one could say history had proven Moses wrong.

It was one of those brilliant mornings when the place a man most wants to be is outside soaking in the sun. Adam Goldsmith had made that choice. He was planted on the sidewalk letting the summer heat paralyze him, letting his mind drift from young men in trucks to the Depression to the wandering in the desert and that heavy ache in his arms and neck Moses had carrying those stone tablets down from the mountain, when the truck door opened and Carl stepped into the light. The jolt hit Adam in a single pulse which struck his chest so violently that he felt—he would have told Dr. Albert Knight except for reasons obvious and otherwise—he was going to collapse on his knees. That would have gone down in West Gull history: Adam Goldsmith, sixty-three-year-old accountant and possibly the most colourless man ever to live in West Gull, falling to his knees on the sidewalk in front of the car lot. “Did he start talking funny?” is what everyone would have asked. He could almost hear the contempt in their voices.

By the time he had consciously recognized Carl, Adam was already walking towards him. The last time Adam had seen Carl was three years ago in Kingston in a judge’s chambers. Carl was sleekly obedient in the dark suit he’d bought for his mother’s funeral, then worn to his wedding. His face was tense and pale, though not so pale as the white strip of skin at the bottom of his neck where his hair had been cut away in
jail. Each time the judge or the prosecutor or his own lawyer spoke, Carl pursed his lips and leaned his head forward, as though to emphasize with what care and repentance he was listening. But Adam could see Carl’s deference was not working in his favour. When Adam’s turn came, he detailed how Richardson’s New & Used would offer Carl a job and even put up a bond to guarantee his good behaviour. The judge looked unimpressed. Then the lawyer whispered to Carl and Carl offered to give up his half of Lizzie’s custody and move away for what would have been the time of his probation.

You wouldn’t believe this was the same boy who couldn’t stay out of fights at hockey games or dances. Or the boy who had gone back to the house where he’d once lived with his lawfully wedded wife, invited her new-old boyfriend out on the lawn and tried to beat him to death with his fists. Or so Chrissy and Fred Verghoers had sworn in court. But Carl and Fred side by side made Adam think of David and Goliath, Carl being the former. Though it wasn’t the first time they’d gone at it. That had been the night of the Richardsons’ last New Year’s party, a night that had begun full of promise, been punctuated by the fight and ended in a disaster Adam Goldsmith still shrank from thinking about.

Standing beside his truck, Carl resembled neither the biblical David nor the scared boy in the judge’s office. He was too controlled, too worried, too
cured
of whatever had driven him. His moustache rode on his upper lip like something he’d bought in a store. Twenty-eight years old he would be. Trust an accountant to know the numbers. His eyes still had the same flicker as his mother’s. And his cheeks had developed faint vertical seams, threatening to deepen into lines that jump
from scowl to smile, also like his mother’s. Or maybe they signified whatever Carl must have armed himself with in order to return.

“Good to see you.”

“Well, I’m back.”

Up close Carl’s face took on shadows of uncertainty. “Good to see you,” Adam said again. “How’s your father?”

“Haven’t made that visit yet. What do I owe you for hauling the car out of the lake?”

Carl’s mouth twitched with a forbidden smile. Adam was tempted to tell him how Luke had screamed when he’d found out what had happened. How he’d threatened to call the police until reminded how funny the whole story would look on the television news: would-be reeve Luke Richardson is prosecuting a man for joy-riding a car into Dead Swede Lake on the very farm the would-be reeve had bought from under him. “That would be Dead Reeve Lake for you,” Adam had summarized but Luke was a man who preferred his own jokes.

“Don’t worry about it,” Adam now said to Carl and, unable to resist, “we have Dead Reeve Lake insurance.”

Carl looked startled. “Thanks, Adam.”

“Luke’s idea. He’s glad you’re back.”

Carl just stood there soaking up the sun. Adam didn’t mind that. Most people in West Gull were full of fake friendliness towards him because he was Luke Richardson’s business manager and to cross him was to cross Luke. But behind all the oil and the devotion were the smirks: there’s soft old Adam Goldsmith, the sexless eternal bachelor, Luke Richardson’s court eunuch, Flora Goldsmith’s boy, the boy who spoke in tongues when he was young and then, before disappearing to university, became a shy reedy teenager who walked with his
head down and took to riding his bicycle around the country roads because his mother never thought to buy him a car and his father got killed in the war.

That reedy teenager had shot up to well over six feet, had developed a respectable bulge around the belly and was, as Adam Goldsmith kept telling himself, sixty-three years old. Old enough to have been part-owner and manager of the New & Used long enough to drive whatever he wanted. On the day Carl came back to West Gull, Adam was wearing the pale yellow cotton suit that was his summer uniform. With his jacket slung over his shoulder, his collar unbuttoned and his tie yanked loose, Adam Goldsmith looked like what he was: an aging member of the small and aging West Gull business community; the tall dreamy son of his own scarcely imaginable tall dreamy father; the bookish mainstay of the West Gull Memorial Library; a man as familiar to the West Gull streets as an old pair of shoes.

Now that they had run out of conversation, Carl was remembering that he used to take Adam for granted—until it struck him that Adam Goldsmith must be a homosexual, no doubt with a secret life down in the Kingston bars. What Carl couldn’t understand was why Adam stayed in West Gull. “I suppose Luke put his balls somewhere for safekeeping,” McKelvey had once said, and Carl had seen his mother throw his father one of those looks she gave him when he got drunk and nasty, then walk out of the room. She hadn’t minded Adam. He’d often been to the school for meetings of the library committee, and Carl would come in from after-school hockey to find them cataloguing books and drinking tea and chattering away like two old ladies. After Elizabeth died, it turned out she’d made Adam her executor and left her school insurance
money in trust for Carl to receive when he turned twenty-five—a little twist on the safekeeping theme McKelvey didn’t appreciate. All of that money was put away for Lizzie now.

“Do you have somewhere to stay?” Adam asked. Carl had forgotten the way Adam talked to you, as though looking at an imaginary bird perched on your shoulder. Carl was free to look at Adam’s eyes which weren’t looking at his: they were light blue, a blue that in this intense July light was almost transparent, with pupils so narrow and densely black you had to wonder if they were the real Adam Goldsmith, tiny irreducible bits of flint usually covered by his pale bland exterior. And then before Carl could answer: “We’ll go over to the real-estate office. Get Doreen to fix you up.”

Carl knew he had to be back in West Gull by the way Doreen Whittier’s sallow face turned to brittle porcelain as he came in the office door, as though despite the fact that he was a grown man, he must be looking for something to steal or break. She had been ahead of him in high school but he remembered seeing her hanging around the rink. Now she was wearing Ben Whittier’s wedding band and was the kind of woman he used to call ma’am until Chrissy told him he sounded like a hillbilly.

As soon as Adam followed and explained what Carl was looking for, in the voice he would have used if he needed it for himself, her face snapped into a different shape. Adam had transformed him from a worthless McKelvey to visiting royalty.

“Would you be wanting it starting next month?”

“Any time,” Carl said. “Tonight would be fine.” She gave him a surprised look but Adam was looming over her, smiling.

“Come back after lunch and I’ll have something.” She turned to her papers as though he had already gone.

On the street Carl bought a newspaper and went next door to the Timberpost. He had known coming back would be difficult but he hadn’t anticipated the feelings it was bringing on, this small-boy-caught-in-the-act shame combined with a distance he had never had, a second self that was calmly watching. He was grateful the waitress was someone he’d never seen. When she gave him the menu he realized he needed something more than coffee and ordered the all-day breakfast: three eggs over easy, home-fried potatoes, whole-wheat toast with strawberry jam. They arrived on a white oval platter with a maroon border, sitting in small pools of grease. Between his toast and his coffee cup he had the neatly folded Classified section of the newspaper. He began looking through the advertisements for cottages and waterfront homes. There was no doubt that for half a million dollars he could get a pretty nice place. Two or three acres on the water, big trees, a house with a stone fireplace and a family room where he and Lizzie could watch television and play computer games, or whatever people did in their family rooms. His eyes scanned further down the column and then he saw it:

The waitress was standing over him.

“Anything wrong?” he asked.

“I just wanted to know if you were finished.”

Carl looked down. He had consumed the eggs and potatoes without noticing, even wiped the platter clean with his toast. “I’ll have the same,” Carl said.

“The same?”

“The same as I had before.”

The waitress took away his plate and refilled his cup. Carl turned to the personals.

That was what he and Lizzie could do in the family room: search the papers for a suitable companion to share their estate. But Lizzie was probably expecting him to get back with Chrissy. “You going to stay long?” she had asked and when Carl had nodded and squeezed her shoulder she’d said, as though he weren’t there, “I wonder where he’s going to live.”

“I’ll find a place,” Carl supplied. “Then you can come and stay with me whenever you want to.”

“Marbles too?”

“Is that your cat?”

“Yes.” So formal. So terrified of him but needing him so much. She looked like Chrissy and yet she didn’t. Or maybe she looked like him. Then, as though reading his mind, she’d said, “I need you to be here.”

“Good. I need you.” That was after the monkey bars. They were sitting in the truck eating ice cream and holding hands. Like a first date. He was afraid to hug her, he didn’t want to scare her.

She was the one who’d made all the moves. Like putting her hand to his face to touch his chin. “You cut yourself shaving. Mom sometimes cuts her legs.” Which gave Carl the un-summoned memory of Chrissy in the bathtub, tan line across the tops of her small white breasts whose nipples used to aim slightly upward—anti-aircraft guns he’d call them—one long leg stretched out, with the heel on the side of the bathtub, turned out so she could get at her calf. “You look like a porno movie,” he’d told her. “You wish,” she’d laughed, extending her other leg and arching her back.